The Brother of My Fiancee
by Artemis Day
Summary: It was such a simple task: go to visit Thor's brother and invite him to the wedding. It should have been easy, but nothing is easy where Loki Odinson is concerned. And by the end of the night, neither he, nor Jane Foster, will be the same ever again. Lokane.


**A/N: Written for AVLand at LiveJournal, and based on a scene (or actually two scenes spliced together) from the movie, Moonstruck.**

**Hope you enjoy!**

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><p>Jane knocked on the fifth door to the left, on the eighteenth floor of the grand, opulent building that housed the city's rich and famous. It was the first time Jane set foot inside after passing it on the way to work a thousand times before. The whole place was like something out of a Victorian fairy tale. Gothic décor abounded, complete with ornate mirrors on each end of the wall above square end tables with legs like creeping vines, and chandeliers made of cascading diamonds bolted to the ceiling to light her way. Every one of those diamonds was probably real, and worth more than Jane's life and the lives of her friends and family.<p>

She had let herself into the building, not needing to buzz in since she didn't technically know the person she coming to see. Looking at this place, she doubted that they were going to become bosom buddies. If Jane remembered correctly, there was bad blood between Thor and his brother anyway. What that bad blood was, she didn't know. When she asked Thor over dinner the night before his big overseas trip- the same night he asked her to personally invite his brother to their wedding- he had swallowed his tongue and refused to speak a word until Jane began gushing over the restaurant's meat sauce. Thor was a big eater, so talking food was always a good way to ease the tension.

Now that Jane was here, she wished she'd pushed him a little harder. Twenty minutes alone had been wasted looking for the right building among hundreds of skyscrapers that made her tiny apartment complex on the west end of the city look like a child's tree house. Another ten went to looking for an elevator, finding someone with their head far enough out of their own ass to help her find it, and then standing in the elevator as it climbed up and up and up and all the way to Loki Odinson's floor. It was a real good thing Jane was a patient woman (and had never been afraid of heights).

She listened for movement inside. The whole floor was muted by a lack of windows and doors. There were only two other apartments in sight. As Jane had wandered through the building, she'd gotten a sense that the richer you were, the higher your floor was. Or that could have been the whole 'millionaire fiancé' thing talking. Either way, Thor's brother was loaded.

She had all but pressed her ear to the door when it opened. A tall, thin man in a fitted white button-down shirt and black slacks appeared, staring down at Jane like she was a bug he'd just stepped on. Were it not for that look, Jane would've noticed right away that Thor's brother was absolutely gorgeous, just like Thor himself. She could chalk that up to genetics, except the two of them looked nothing alike. Supernatural good looks were about the only physical trait they shared. That and ridiculous height.

"May I help you?"

He sounded bored, bored and annoyed. Jane's steeled nerves began to fray.

"Hi there," she said, coughing to clear her throat. "I'm sorry to show up unannounced like this-"

"I'd be more offended if I knew who you were."

If that was a joke, Jane could hardly tell. He spoke with all the solemnity of a motorist who had to tell a kid they'd just run their dog down in the street. Something about it was raising red flags in Jane's mind, but that had to be her imagination. Any brother of Thor's had to be a good guy deep down, maybe just a bit rough around the edges.

"My name is Jane Foster," she said. "We've never met before, but I'm going to marry your brother, Thor. He asked me to come introduce myself, and invite you to the wedding."

She fingered the official invitation in her oversized jacket pocket. It was made of a sturdy white parchment Thor's mother had chosen. Frigga had been a godsend during all this hectic planning and scheduling. She was a tad overbearing, if just because she'd feared for so long that her eldest son would never grow out of his womanizing ways and settle down. Jane wouldn't be surprised if Frigga was already picking out names for her future grandkids.

After seeing the changes in expression Loki went through in the next ten seconds (and indeed, through everything that was to follow), Jane wished that Frigga had taken just a little time out of choosing venues and making floral arrangements to let her know that her estranged second son was… different from other people.

"You're going to marry Thor," Loki said. He blinked several times and the sides of his mouth quirked up, slowly and steadily into a grin too large for his face. "_You_ are going to marry _Thor_."

Jane fidgeted. "Thor was hoping that you'd come to the wedding. He really wants to see you again."

Loki had turned away before Jane had the final word out. He walked into his living room, which was sparsely furnished with top of the line furniture. A sheer glass coffee table with serpentine carvings sat on a polished wooden floor in front of a green velvet couch with a well-worn dent on the far left side. Next to that was a matching loveseat that was untouched. He got as far as the kitchen. It was filled with modern appliances that might as well be fresh out of the box for how used they looked. That was when it hit Jane that the shaking of his shoulders was not from crying.

His laughter was low and breathy, like the sound a tire made when it deflated piece by piece through a hole the size of a pin. It grew into more or a snicker, but it carried the same sinister edge that had Jane glancing down the hall at that elevator. If she was quiet enough, she could probably get away before he-

"Do you like these walls?"

Jane jumped. She looked back into the apartment, her heart pounding out of her chest. Loki was facing her, pressing a hand into the smooth surface of the wall. He had the tiniest smile, so tiny Jane almost missed it. Once she knew it was there, she could've sworn the temperature in the room had dropped.

"I'm sorry?"

Loki ran his hand over the wall in a circle.

"I had this wall re-painted last month. From hunter green to forest green. I find I much prefer it."

He stepped away, tapping his feet and leaving prints only visible in the light, which they currently have in abundance.

"I also replaced most of my living room furniture." He stopped in front of the loveseat. "I had kept the first set far too long. It was becoming so depressing to look at." He passed the loveseat and sunk into his hole on the couch. "You see, when you live like I do, you get to have a lot of _things_. Things become your only solace, your only friends, your comfort in life. You forget what it was like to have friends and family in place of those things. I think for me it's been ages since anyone knocked on my door to call on me."

'_Sure seems like it,'_ Jane thought. That elevator was still right there any time.

"And so I remain with my things, and my job, and my money. I've made quite a bit you know," he sunk lower into the hole. "And while I rot with it all, I sometimes remember my family, and my brother. Oh, how long it has been since I have seen their faces…" He looks at Jane, his eyes sad and wild at the same time. "And now I hear that he is to marry! How wonderful! How very incredibly, extraordinarily, intensely wonderful!"

Loki stood up, and it might have just been all in Jan's head, but he appeared to have teleported to her side. It was the only explanation she had for how he could be across the room one second, and leading her into his apartment the next. Her footprints joined his across the waxy flooring, longer in some places where her legs stopped working.

"Tell me, Ms. Foster, has my brother regaled you with any stories from our youth?"

"A few things," she answered carefully. Why hadn't she left when she had the chance? "Not much. He said that there were some problems between you guys."

"Oh, problems between us," he said, shaking his head. "Problems, yes. So many problems."

He dropped Jane on the couch opposite him. She watched his back as he went to the kitchen. He was broad shouldered like Thor, though of a more slender build that suited him well. Jane stopped her drumming at the crystalline coffee table and stewed in discomforting silence, but it didn't allow her to figure out where that thought had come from.

"I'm surprised he never explained to you just what those problems were," he said, and then stuck his head out from the open doorway. "Of course, that would require telling you anything about his formative years at all. And if he is to stay in your good graces, he would do well never to mention them at all."

Jane heard some metal clanking in the kitchen, and then the schwing of a knife being drawn. She sucked in a breath.

"Are you saying Thor wasn't a good kid?"

"I am saying nothing at all. It's you who was speaking."

Jane had finished counting the steps between the couch and the front door. About fifteen, give or take. If he planned to stay in there for a long time…

"Maybe you could tell me about it at the wedding."

"I think I would much rather take this knife and run it across my throat than set foot in your wedding."

He stepped out with a pair of drinks on a tray, with nothing that required a knife to go with it. She kept glancing out into the hall as Loki placed one glass in front of her and one before himself, double and triple checking the number of steps to a door left wide open for the whole world (this millionaire with his luxury apartment full of expensive furniture and valuables apparently didn't care a lick about security). Fifteen steps. Just fifteen steps if things got any weirder.

"Why don't I tell you some of those rousing stories now?" Loki had consumed the entirety of whatever was in his glass, and that was all Jane had to go on to convince herself that her drink wasn't poisoned.

(Judging by the way he was acting, it was probably alcoholic instead.)

"Actually, I should be going." Jane pulled out the invitation that was almost entirely crumpled up. His name was barely legible in the smudged cursive font. "If I could just leave this here-"

"Oh, but you've only just arrived!" Loki pulled at Jane until her head was pressed into his chest, and though on the outside he looked all skin and bones, underneath that shirt, he was hard as a rock. "I have so many stories to tell you about Thor as a child. You're going to be his wife, aren't you? The beloved lady of his heart. You'll need to know everything about him! Every story, every scar, every bike he used to put sticks in front of, every day in first grade that he cried for our mother and had to be sent home…"

For the next half hour, Loki went through every little anecdote he could think of, starting with the time Thor tried to get a ball back from a mean old dog next door and got chased four blocks, moving on to an incident where Thor slipped a baby frog in the school principal's canteen and got suspended (from the way Loki told that story, Jane got the distinct impression that Thor wasn't so guilty of that one), and ending with a moment before that big falling out that had Jane here in the first place, trying to figure out how to gently break it to Thor that his brother was batshit insane.

"So I had asked Thor to check the book back in for me since I would be too busy that week to stop at the library." They were in the kitchen now, and Jane was enjoying a ham sandwich that she'd either made herself or had found waiting for her when she got there. She was having trouble remembering. He was actually a really good storyteller. "That was my first mistake- trusting Thor with an important task. The dull headed buffoon wound up throwing the book in the backseat of his car and forgetting about it for four weeks. By then, the mad old librarian had decided the best way to collect the overdue fees from me was to burst into the office and chase me with her cane, howling like a banshee. I have never seen a ninety seven year old woman run so fast in my entire life."

"The papers…" Jane murmured, in place of the laugh she did _not_ want him to hear under any circumstances.

"I'm sorry, what was that?"

Although, come to think about it, maybe bringing that up wasn't such a hot idea either. Jane moved to reposition herself, shifting her weight from one side to the other. She rolled her shoulders back and released a long sigh. None of this was capable of releasing her from his gaze. Those eyes of his were almost supernatural in the power they wielded. They ripped through Jane's defenses, tore at her will, and all she was trying to hold back was a silly anecdote of her own!

"It's just that what you said reminded me of this thing that happened six months ago," Jane said. "I had some paperwork to fill out for grant money- I'm a scientist working independently- and I needed to run some errands and couldn't pick them up, so I asked Thor to stop at the University on his way to work and get them for me. He did, but…"

"Go on," Loki said after a beat.

Jane bit her lip. "Well, when I got home that night… god, this is so stupid. He had a bunch of his friends over, and they'd been drinking, and they decided to have a paper airplane contest of all things."

"A _paper airplane_ contest?"

"Is that the most absurd thing you've ever heard too?" Jane asked, and suddenly, she didn't feel so bad about laughing in front of him, or with him.

They calmed themselves down over another glass of scotch, which Jane was finally able to recognize after a second helping, courtesy of her hard drinking best friend and maid of honor.

"I assume you were able to retrieve a new set of papers," Loki said.

"Lucky for me, the deadline was a week away, so all I had to do was go back the next day and make up some excuse like I'd written my social wrong."

Loki hummed and poured himself another drink. Jane politely refused the bottle when he offered it to her. She counted out the four glasses he'd had so far and marveled at how well he was holding his liquor. She'd only had two and the room was slanting to the side.

"So, what is the deal with you and Thor?" she asked, because apparently the booze was also loosening her lips in the most dangerous of ways.

Loki's face fell, and he lowered the glass he'd been about to knock back. There seemed to be a bit less color in his cheeks than there should have been, and Jane could no longer tell that was the scotch or just his natural pallor.

"I don't think that's something you want to hear," he said.

"Says who?"

Loki frowned. "I do." He stood up. "I feel that knowing would sour you to me."

'_Dude, I already think you're nuts,'_ Jane thought to herself. At least that she still knew not to verbalize. "Come on, try me."

He took a long time to sit back down in spite of her prompting. He seemed to be weighing his options between going ahead with that suicide and adding a murder to it. That may have just been the alcohol talking and the shine of the knife blade. He had never put it back in the drawer.

"I suppose it is just a cruel twist of fate, what happened." Loki had a more relaxed stance when he flopped down on the chair. That 'relaxed' for him constituted spreading his legs wider than a bridge was not lost on her. "In life, there are certain things that go beyond our control. Things we might wish we could change, but must learn to accept that we cannot. I know this quite well. I've had more than my share of time to learn it. Oh yes I have."

Was he still talking to her? He was looking in her direction, but there might have been a mirror over her head that she hadn't seen before.

"About three years ago, I came upon a rather startling revelation about myself while searching for incriminating evidence against a business partner." He left out why he would need to do such a thing. Probably for the best. "Instead, I came upon a two and a half decades old set of adoption papers bearing my name. You can imagine how I felt and all the questions I had. My so-called mother and father could not provide satisfactory answers, and Thor, being the bumbling oaf he is, only simpered and sobbed and promised that we'd _always_ be brothers no matter what. Blood doesn't matter in the slightest, oh no."

Loki chuckled to himself, but if Jane was honest, it was more like a giggle. The only grown men she ever met who giggled had been potential serial killers in bad TV movie. This was not boding well at all.

"Hang on a second," Jane said, furrowing her brow. "You're saying that the bad blood between you and Thor is that you found out you were adopted?"

"It is a bit more multi-faceted than your wording implies," Loki said, crossing his arms over his chest. "But yes, that is the bottom line."

"But I don't understand. That's not Thor's fault."

The expression Loki now wore was one of warmth and serenity. It disarmed Jane. It stayed in place as he pulled his knees together in a surreptitious manner, and when he flipped the table over in one quick motion and sent their glasses and a decorative vase crashing to the floor.

"I think you'll find that I don't care," he said, his voice barely a whisper. He was on his feet once more. "If you think that I will swallow what remains of my pride for the sake of that idiot and his happiness, you are sorely mistaken, and best served leaving. Now."

He stepped over the mess and walked across the living room into a room with a king sized bed with coiled snakes engraved on the headboard, and an oak dresser with the bottom drawer hanging open. The door slammed behind him before Jane could see what was in there, not that she'd been looking hard. The upturned table had all of her attention. She sat, shell-shocked, with her mouth wide open in a silent scream. She was eventually able to screw it shut, and watch his bedroom door for signs of his return. If he was doing anything in there at all, then that snake motif of his wasn't just for show. Loki could _move_ like one.

She waited long enough for the liquid to seep into the spotless kitchen floor and leave permanent water damage, long enough for the wind from an open window to blow the front door shut, and long enough to stop wondering why she hadn't left yet. The sun was going down by the time that crossed her mind.

She came to stand in front of a door, but it was the wrong one. It opened when she turned the knob. What a surprise. She thought for sure he would have locked it. Ignoring her basic survival instincts, Jane let herself into Loki's bedroom. He had kicked that bottom drawer shut. That was the first thing she noticed. The second was Loki himself, sitting at the foot of the bed with his head in his hands. She thought his eyes flicked up over his hair, but if he knew she was there, he wasn't going to say so. He seemed intent to wallow in self-pity until morning came. It filled Jane with frustrations she could hardly explain.

She came very close to sitting next to him, forgetting that he wasn't her friend and this was a bed. She pretended to stretch in a poor attempt to cover it up. Had he been watching, he'd probably think _she_ was the crazy one (and he wouldn't be far off).

"I was thinking," she said, and immediately regretted it. He didn't suddenly glare at her or order her out or do anything at all, but Jane couldn't shake the feeling that she was pushing her luck. She was pushing it right off a cliff. "I'm not so good at giving advice or being philosophical, but what if… I mean, what if it's a good thing that you're adopted?"

Now he looked up, his face blank. He said nothing.

"I mean, I get that you're angry your parents lied to you. I completely understand that. Anyone in your situation would feel that way." _'You're rambling Jane. Get to the point or get to running._' "What I'm trying to say is: what if you weren't in the right place before? I mean, you seem to be doing well for yourself on your own. Who knows if you would have done so well if you had your family on your mind? Not that it's bad to have a family, it's just that… maybe you were meant for something they couldn't understand, or that they were holding you back from. I don't think they meant to if that's the case, sometimes these things just happen. It's like…"

Jane once had to give an oral report on early European history in front of fifty kids in the eleventh grade, and she hadn't been nearly as terrified then as she was now. Somehow, a group of people didn't match up to this one man, who seemed at the same time pitiful and untouchable.

"I mean- compare yourself to a wolf stuck in a trap. They know they need to get out of the trap, so they do what they have to escape. They- they gnaw their leg off if they have to. You needed to get away from your family to start on your own path, so they're like the leg… that you… gnawed off…"

Now Jane sat on the bed. She didn't care anymore; she just needed to get off her feet. That was the stupidest thing she ever said to anyone, and Loki didn't need to acknowledge it in any way for her to know it. This was why she didn't give pep talks or advice, because all she did was ramble and make stupid analogies that didn't work and made her look like a putz.

The heat of her humiliation burned hot, and then she happened to look up and see Loki watching her. His color was returning slowly to his cheeks, but it was those damn eyes of his again that grabbed hold of her and held her in a vice grip. If there was a way to interpret that look- or the way he came to stand over her with his arms half out as if to restrain her- Jane did not know it.

"You are without a doubt the strangest woman I have ever met," Loki said, like this was a profound revelation.

In fact, he seemed so in awe, that it turned the whole situation around from completely audacious to utterly hilarious. Jane was overcome.

"And you are the craziest man I've ever met."

She didn't lament having spoken so brazenly. She should have, but her body wouldn't allow it. Apprehension was a thing of the past. She had stayed too long in this den of pure madness, and now she was numb to it. He leaned into so close with a darkening gaze and she met him halfway like it was nothing.

"Do you love him?"

The question came out of nowhere and required no explanation. Jane knew what he meant and she knew the right answer. There were two. The first was a slap on the face and a huff as she informed him of what an asshole he was and walked out of his room and his life forever. Barring that, it should be a firm 'yes' followed by a question of why that was even his business in the first place, which it wasn't. Both were viable options. She could even mix the two. That would show Loki Odinson who was boss. The thought alone made Jane want to smile. Just imagine how shocked he would be, how amazed by her boldness as his attempts at intimidation fell flat. That would be Jane's answer any day of the week.

Any day before today- before this very moment- when Loki looked at her in a way no one ever had, not even Thor.

Then she was standing. He had pulled her with such force, first to her feet and then to him, that Jane's head was spinning. Their lips were together, Loki's moving against hers with frenetic motions. His hands were moving around her waist, and he was so strong. Jane had to act fast. She pushed him with all her might to break free.

"Wait! _Wait a minute!"_

She gulped down air, once, twice, three times. His mouth was still open, his eyes on fire. Maybe hers were too. She leaped back into the flames, kissing him so hard she thought her teeth would break. Somewhere deep inside of her, there was some shriveled, nearly dead bit of common sense that screamed at the top of its lungs for her to stop. Jane couldn't hear it. There was a roaring in her ears that deafened her to all but the little moans and gasps each of them issued.

This kiss was very much like the rest of Loki: so unlike Thor that it was no wonder they weren't blood relation. They were polar opposites. Thor's kisses were gentle, sweet, and methodical- like a true gentleman. Loki's was fast, desperate, and all-consuming. He was a monster. He didn't care about anything except having her as fully as possible. And he would.

They were both going to burn in hell, but by God, he would.

He wanted to hate Thor? Fine. He could take it out on her.

They fell into bed together, everything gone from both of them except this inexplicable and unbridled need. The moon outside was bright and full. It shined on them, like a great big diamond in the sky. It put all those shimmering chandeliers and the ring on Jane's finger to shame.


End file.
